Tony Bevan's breakthrough paintings date from the mid 1980s and were the subject of a one-person exhibition at the ICA in 1987. The previous year a new book on Antonin Artaud had been published, reviving an interest in the tormented artist whose work Bevan had first seen in 1977. As Marco Livingstone has observed: `The scarred, scabrous look of Bevan's heads, with their geography of veins and arteries turned inside out, bears comparison with the pitted and ravaged surfaces of Artaud's faces of suffering, anxiety and nervous turmoil'. Marco Livingstone, `Tony Bevan. The Spirit Beneath the Skin', in Tony Bevan, 1998

Tony Bevan's marks, however, do not simply suggest the scars or wounds left through assault, but instead have a dual function: a mapping of the body whose physicality suggest that the image is a summation of tactile as well as visual stimuli, and a pattern of solid marks and lines that assume their own abstract autonomy: `Each mark has a physicality and abstract presence that give it an existence independent of its representational function: taken together, however, these same marks are presented incontrovertibly as the constituent parts of an image summoned to life.' (Marco Livingstone).

The result of this emphasis on mark making is a marriage of chance and control that recalls Francis Bacon. As Richard Cork has elaborated: `Bacon once undoubtedly exerted an important influence on the young man's work. Bevan, who often starts by drawing straight onto the wet canvas with charcoal, shares Bacon's partiality for linear painting. He also likes to contrast densely worked areas of flesh with flat expanses of saturated colour. Above all, both Bacon and Bevan are painters of humanity in a void, with a troubling emphasis on the carcass-like quality of bare flesh.'

Richard Cork, `In Extremis: Bevan and the Western Tradition', in Tony Bevan. Paintings and Drawing, London, 2000

In Bevan's work the gap between drawing and painting is small. In looking for differences, it is often Bevan's change of scale that is the most dramatic way in which the pictorial experience changes. As a result Bevan's practice is essentially one of draughtsmanship and about line. Whilst it would be wrong to suggest that the lines are descriptive or that they record outline, they nonetheless are the means by which form is created. This is a great challenge given the artist's avoidance of shadows to create volume and his use of flat expanses of a single colour, practices that are far removed from the tonal modelling with which Sickert began the century, or the swathes of charcoal that fill Bomberg's drawings.

Bevan has explained that 'I find the behavioural patterns of charcoal fascinating and the possibilities of paint endless' and clearly his working method has had a big impact on the evolution of his imagery.1 Chance discoveries suggest the possibilities of new directions to be explored. This feature coupled with the strong physicality of Bevan's paintings has led to comparisons with Francis Bacon. What Bevan may share with Bacon is the way in which the body is presented as an expressive whole, not just the armature for the subject's head: Bevan has commented that 'I recognise the bodiliness of my portraits' and admitted that his portraits 'don't necessarily hold the psychological content that the face can hold.'1 However, although Bacon is an artist that Bevan admires, his stimuli are wide-ranging. Not only is Bevan's practice derived from drawing, unlike that of Bacon, but his apparent distortions also have a different basis, not least, the fact that although Bevan is interested in physiognomy and types, his portraits are also about the revelation of an individual's psyche:

'since I was a student I've been interested in physiognomy and in artists who used it. I did my thesis on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's life-size busts and am interested in artists' handbooks, like Charles LeBrun's, that show how to represent individual emotions such as anxiety and sadness. But what interests me is how to get beyond the illustration of a single emotion, to be able to hold a number of emotions and actual thoughts.'2

1. Tony Bevan, interview with JH, February 1993

2. as above